Not if you want to play any new PC games that use DX10.
You mean the ones that haven't come out yet?
I'm sure they'll trickle in eventually, but it's going to be a while before games require DirectX 10. Even after Vista comes out, it will take a bit before game producers can safely assume that most of the people buying the game have a copy of Vista.
Well, I imagine you'd have a tough time getting an elected government to pass any sort of post-office review law. Why would legislators want to subject themselves to more scrutiny? As long as they're making the laws, they're not going to pass laws that have the potential to hinder or endanger themselves in any way.
My recollection is that Microsoft was charged with violating the Sherman Act. Basically, it's illegal to use a monopoly in one field to create a monopoly in another field. You can read more about this on Wikipedia or a great book written about the trial named Pride Before the Fall by John Heilemann.
You might not agree with the law, but of course the prosecution would find a legal basis for their case. It wasn't just the local constable hauling them in for a breach of the peace, y'know?
You make some interesting points, but some of your statistics seem a tad misleading.
I pay the WoW fee myself and I think it's closer to $13 a month, and it gets cheaper if you pay for longer periods of time. I believe they just announced they hit the 6 million subscriber mark.
The 1/45 Americans play WoW claim is probably far too optimistic. Going by your numbers, 5 million * 45 = 225 million Americans. The CIA World Factbook lists the US population as 298 million. Also, that 6 million subscriber mark refers to subscribers worldwide, not only in the United States. Blizzard has a large presence in Korea and China, and the pay system for the Chinese version of WoW is different from the subscriber model in the US. I've heard that you pay by the hour to play it in China, and so there's probably many accounts made by people who played for short periods of time or play only intermittently (but they still probably count it towards their subscriber count). Furthermore, most Chinese don't have US $13-15 a month to spend on games, so the price is lower.
It's still a phenomenally successful game, but you'd need a more advanced model to see what their revenue is. It also costs a lot of upkeep to run a game like WoW - server hardware, people to maintain all that hardware and the game software, and content developers so people don't get bored and quit. Blizzard plays their cards pretty close to their chests so I don't think us schmos can easily find out how much profit it makes them.
I'm guessing maybe a portrait of David Hume or Richard Dawkins? Maybe Sigmund Freud or Socrates? Or maybe it's a big picture of Nietzsche that says "God is dead." Choose your furnishing wisely when living with your theistic landlord!
It's probably never gonna happen, but I know several people who would gladly drop everything to play a Murloc. We even started a Murloc guild...
Mike Jeffress
on
Amazon Connect
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Did anyone see the quote from the Reverend Mike Jeffress?
"It must be that at the root of the current war against Christmas is spiritual warfare in which Satan and his demons are seeking to gain control of the most powerful free nation in the world in order to persecute Jesus Christ and his followers," Mr. Jeffress wrote. "All the more reason why I believe my latest book, 'The Prayer of Jehoshaphat for America: The Power of Repentance in a Time of Crisis,' would make a great Christmas gift this year."
Satan is among us, so make sure you buy my book so you can find out how to stop him! Usually people aren't so brazen about these kind of cash grabs, but I guess he was inspired by all the hullabaloo lately.
Makes me wonder what other sorts of author opinions they'd be willing to host. If I write a book about UFO conspiracies, can I count on Amazon to post my latest theory?
- System Shock 2 (although it used it well, I'd say) - Cyberia 2 - Final Fantasy 3 (aka FF6 in Japan)
Dang, that's all I can think of right now where it's amnesia. There are a lot more games that give you a very ambiguous background (like Morrowind or a lot of other RPGs) so that you have a more-or-less blank slate when you're developing that character.
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for posting about SWG lately. I don't even play the game, but your stories are entertaining to read. It's pretty crazy that such a huge, anticipated game could screw up so badly.
Hi, Mr. Hume! I'm in the course of reading your Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding for one of my classes. Perhaps you can expound upon how we misinterpret the relationship between cause and effect? I think it would be very appropriate to this discussion.
Hope you're doing alright...weren't you born in the 18th century?
As I recall, the PS2 had this problem as well. When it first came out, anti-aliasing was really hard to do on its hardware. Eventually developers figured it out, but it took a while. The best example of this that I know of is Virtua Fighter 4 and its cousin, VF4: Evolution. By the time Evolution came out, Sega had figured out how to get AA working. The models are almost identical between the two games, but everything looks a lot smoother on screen.
Developers will probably have it figured out in a year or two, I'd reckon. But these launch games are gonna be rushed to market and they'll look like it.
Now, I'm all for hacking your PSP into whatever you want it to be, but it's not like Sony's pulling a bait-and-switch. They wanted this thing to be a tightly controlled console that only ran their approved code, and it's been that way since day one. If you bought it with other intents in mind, then hey, have fun making it meet them, but it's not like you can claim that Sony misled you.
I know this probably isn't what you meant, but it does carry that implication.
It seems like all the content additions of late are targetted at level 60 characters (the current maximum). I've been playing WoW for months, but I tend to level slowly and play a lot of alts. Are there any upcoming content additions in the works for characters under level 60? It would be great if there were more instances, or if existing instances could be retooled slightly - both Gnomeregan and Uldaman are viable in the 30s and 40s but tend to be avoided as the enemies clump together too much and cause lots of headaches. Also, troggs seem kind of generic and unimaginative, like fighting orcs in other fantasy games.
I know that the most of the player base tends to graduate to level 60 after a while and that they're the ones most at risk of cancelling their accounts. It makes economic sense to cater to them. However, I think the mid-level game could be more exciting if tweaked properly.
Does anyone know how well Deus Ex: Invisible War sold? I really loved the first game but I felt complete disappointment when I played the PC demo. They definitely got rid of what made the first game great so they could try and make an XBox hit. I'd like to think that the market responded to their crappy juxtaposition by not buying the game, but I haven't been able to find out one way or the other.
Is there any official method of checking how well the game sold and what it cost to develop? I seem to recall that Witchboy and Spector both left Ion Storm right after, so I doubt they were raking in the profit.
I don't remember how long the span of time was between Half-Life and its first expansion, Opposing Force, but I remember that they contracted another company, Gearbox, to do it. They could conceivably do the same thing with this expansion - give another company the engine and let them focus entirely on content while Valve does whatever other projects it wants to. This could lead to a quicker turn-around for any expansion, as the contracting company would only have to focus on making content and not on whatever other stuff Valve is doing.
Well, there is the reality that if you buy a computer platform that doesn't sell well, you'll have a tougher time with it later. One issue is hardware support and extendability... a discontinued product is a lot harder to get fixed or buy new peripherals for. Also, in the case of the Mac Mini, higher sales will increase the installed base of OS X users, encouraging more software development for the platform.
I agree that you should buy what's best for yourself, but if you're the only one on the planet with your platform, then you're not gonna be able to do much with it.
I've got a Powerbook with the same specs as yours, and I was curious about how WoW displays. I remember that in Warcraft III, the interface was designed for a 4:3 screen ratio so both the interface and the in-game 3d models looked really squished and distorted when you displayed it on the Powerbook screen. Did they fix this for WoW, or does everything still look squished?
My friend had an Inspiron this summer. He told me it had desktop-level hardware in it, including a full Radeon (I dunno if that part is true or not). So he brings it in one day and I wonder "What's the thing he's setting the laptop on?" Then I noticed it was actually the case. Just the keyboard section of the laptop itself was something like two inches thick. The whole thing weighed ten pounds and the power adaptor was the size of about two DVD cases.
It was absolutely ridiculous. It must be basically a mini ATX motherboard in a laptop-shaped case. It's literally about the size of an XBox. He ended up selling it.
So my advice for anyone looking at an Inspiron or any other laptop is this: Make sure you take the size of the thing into account! There reaches a certain point where size becomes totally impractical, and you'll have to decide what that point is yourself. But don't get a battleship-sized laptop just because it's cheap. Oh yeah, and I'm aware that there are several different Inspiron sizes...but watch out for this sucker.
From what I understand, colleges are competing with each other now more than ever to offer better residential settings for their students. This is an attempt to get more students to choose their college specifically. The admissions people can tell students "You get free streaming music just for being a student!" I bet it'll work pretty well, too.
I do agree that colleges are losing focus from academics, though.
There's one feature of Firefox that keeps me on Safari so far. I can middle-click (the scrollwheel button) on a link in Safari and it'll open in a new tab. Is there some way to enable this in Firefox for OS X? The options menu in 0.8 was distressingly sparse.
Well, uh, I don't mean to be an apologist, but I guess I'll point out that that scene happens while they're in the Matrix. Neo can obviously mess with the rules, so I'm guessing that he could change the bit about whacking into someone at high speed.
That said, I think I'm the last person on earth who enjoyed the latter two Matrix movies (well, maybe about two-thirds of Revolutions).
Yeah, I have the misfortune of living in a dorm and if I didn't have a noisy PC to generate white noise, I'd probably have gone completely insane listening to all the inevitable noise that's generated from living with this many people. Whenever I see an article like this I always wonder why anyone would want a quieter PC.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the ones that haven't come out yet?
I'm sure they'll trickle in eventually, but it's going to be a while before games require DirectX 10. Even after Vista comes out, it will take a bit before game producers can safely assume that most of the people buying the game have a copy of Vista.
Well, I imagine you'd have a tough time getting an elected government to pass any sort of post-office review law. Why would legislators want to subject themselves to more scrutiny? As long as they're making the laws, they're not going to pass laws that have the potential to hinder or endanger themselves in any way.
My recollection is that Microsoft was charged with violating the Sherman Act. Basically, it's illegal to use a monopoly in one field to create a monopoly in another field. You can read more about this on Wikipedia or a great book written about the trial named Pride Before the Fall by John Heilemann.
You might not agree with the law, but of course the prosecution would find a legal basis for their case. It wasn't just the local constable hauling them in for a breach of the peace, y'know?
You make some interesting points, but some of your statistics seem a tad misleading.
I pay the WoW fee myself and I think it's closer to $13 a month, and it gets cheaper if you pay for longer periods of time. I believe they just announced they hit the 6 million subscriber mark.
The 1/45 Americans play WoW claim is probably far too optimistic. Going by your numbers, 5 million * 45 = 225 million Americans. The CIA World Factbook lists the US population as 298 million. Also, that 6 million subscriber mark refers to subscribers worldwide, not only in the United States. Blizzard has a large presence in Korea and China, and the pay system for the Chinese version of WoW is different from the subscriber model in the US. I've heard that you pay by the hour to play it in China, and so there's probably many accounts made by people who played for short periods of time or play only intermittently (but they still probably count it towards their subscriber count). Furthermore, most Chinese don't have US $13-15 a month to spend on games, so the price is lower.
It's still a phenomenally successful game, but you'd need a more advanced model to see what their revenue is. It also costs a lot of upkeep to run a game like WoW - server hardware, people to maintain all that hardware and the game software, and content developers so people don't get bored and quit. Blizzard plays their cards pretty close to their chests so I don't think us schmos can easily find out how much profit it makes them.
It's the influence of the shark lobby...it always is. They're trying to destroy our children.
I'm guessing maybe a portrait of David Hume or Richard Dawkins? Maybe Sigmund Freud or Socrates? Or maybe it's a big picture of Nietzsche that says "God is dead." Choose your furnishing wisely when living with your theistic landlord!
It's probably never gonna happen, but I know several people who would gladly drop everything to play a Murloc. We even started a Murloc guild...
Satan is among us, so make sure you buy my book so you can find out how to stop him! Usually people aren't so brazen about these kind of cash grabs, but I guess he was inspired by all the hullabaloo lately.
Makes me wonder what other sorts of author opinions they'd be willing to host. If I write a book about UFO conspiracies, can I count on Amazon to post my latest theory?
A couple more examples:
- System Shock 2 (although it used it well, I'd say)
- Cyberia 2
- Final Fantasy 3 (aka FF6 in Japan)
Dang, that's all I can think of right now where it's amnesia. There are a lot more games that give you a very ambiguous background (like Morrowind or a lot of other RPGs) so that you have a more-or-less blank slate when you're developing that character.
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for posting about SWG lately. I don't even play the game, but your stories are entertaining to read. It's pretty crazy that such a huge, anticipated game could screw up so badly.
Hi, Mr. Hume! I'm in the course of reading your Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding for one of my classes. Perhaps you can expound upon how we misinterpret the relationship between cause and effect? I think it would be very appropriate to this discussion.
Hope you're doing alright...weren't you born in the 18th century?
As I recall, the PS2 had this problem as well. When it first came out, anti-aliasing was really hard to do on its hardware. Eventually developers figured it out, but it took a while. The best example of this that I know of is Virtua Fighter 4 and its cousin, VF4: Evolution. By the time Evolution came out, Sega had figured out how to get AA working. The models are almost identical between the two games, but everything looks a lot smoother on screen.
Developers will probably have it figured out in a year or two, I'd reckon. But these launch games are gonna be rushed to market and they'll look like it.
Well, that's silly. It's between his shoulders and his head!
Now, I'm all for hacking your PSP into whatever you want it to be, but it's not like Sony's pulling a bait-and-switch. They wanted this thing to be a tightly controlled console that only ran their approved code, and it's been that way since day one. If you bought it with other intents in mind, then hey, have fun making it meet them, but it's not like you can claim that Sony misled you.
I know this probably isn't what you meant, but it does carry that implication.
It seems like all the content additions of late are targetted at level 60 characters (the current maximum). I've been playing WoW for months, but I tend to level slowly and play a lot of alts. Are there any upcoming content additions in the works for characters under level 60? It would be great if there were more instances, or if existing instances could be retooled slightly - both Gnomeregan and Uldaman are viable in the 30s and 40s but tend to be avoided as the enemies clump together too much and cause lots of headaches. Also, troggs seem kind of generic and unimaginative, like fighting orcs in other fantasy games.
I know that the most of the player base tends to graduate to level 60 after a while and that they're the ones most at risk of cancelling their accounts. It makes economic sense to cater to them. However, I think the mid-level game could be more exciting if tweaked properly.
Does anyone know how well Deus Ex: Invisible War sold? I really loved the first game but I felt complete disappointment when I played the PC demo. They definitely got rid of what made the first game great so they could try and make an XBox hit. I'd like to think that the market responded to their crappy juxtaposition by not buying the game, but I haven't been able to find out one way or the other.
Is there any official method of checking how well the game sold and what it cost to develop? I seem to recall that Witchboy and Spector both left Ion Storm right after, so I doubt they were raking in the profit.
I don't remember how long the span of time was between Half-Life and its first expansion, Opposing Force, but I remember that they contracted another company, Gearbox, to do it. They could conceivably do the same thing with this expansion - give another company the engine and let them focus entirely on content while Valve does whatever other projects it wants to. This could lead to a quicker turn-around for any expansion, as the contracting company would only have to focus on making content and not on whatever other stuff Valve is doing.
Well, there is the reality that if you buy a computer platform that doesn't sell well, you'll have a tougher time with it later. One issue is hardware support and extendability... a discontinued product is a lot harder to get fixed or buy new peripherals for. Also, in the case of the Mac Mini, higher sales will increase the installed base of OS X users, encouraging more software development for the platform.
I agree that you should buy what's best for yourself, but if you're the only one on the planet with your platform, then you're not gonna be able to do much with it.
Does anyone know the significance of the submitter's moniker? Seems a bit odd that he'd be submitting a story like this.
I've got a Powerbook with the same specs as yours, and I was curious about how WoW displays. I remember that in Warcraft III, the interface was designed for a 4:3 screen ratio so both the interface and the in-game 3d models looked really squished and distorted when you displayed it on the Powerbook screen. Did they fix this for WoW, or does everything still look squished?
My friend had an Inspiron this summer. He told me it had desktop-level hardware in it, including a full Radeon (I dunno if that part is true or not). So he brings it in one day and I wonder "What's the thing he's setting the laptop on?" Then I noticed it was actually the case. Just the keyboard section of the laptop itself was something like two inches thick. The whole thing weighed ten pounds and the power adaptor was the size of about two DVD cases.
It was absolutely ridiculous. It must be basically a mini ATX motherboard in a laptop-shaped case. It's literally about the size of an XBox. He ended up selling it.
So my advice for anyone looking at an Inspiron or any other laptop is this: Make sure you take the size of the thing into account! There reaches a certain point where size becomes totally impractical, and you'll have to decide what that point is yourself. But don't get a battleship-sized laptop just because it's cheap. Oh yeah, and I'm aware that there are several different Inspiron sizes...but watch out for this sucker.
From what I understand, colleges are competing with each other now more than ever to offer better residential settings for their students. This is an attempt to get more students to choose their college specifically. The admissions people can tell students "You get free streaming music just for being a student!" I bet it'll work pretty well, too.
I do agree that colleges are losing focus from academics, though.
There's one feature of Firefox that keeps me on Safari so far. I can middle-click (the scrollwheel button) on a link in Safari and it'll open in a new tab. Is there some way to enable this in Firefox for OS X? The options menu in 0.8 was distressingly sparse.
Well, uh, I don't mean to be an apologist, but I guess I'll point out that that scene happens while they're in the Matrix. Neo can obviously mess with the rules, so I'm guessing that he could change the bit about whacking into someone at high speed.
That said, I think I'm the last person on earth who enjoyed the latter two Matrix movies (well, maybe about two-thirds of Revolutions).
Yeah, I have the misfortune of living in a dorm and if I didn't have a noisy PC to generate white noise, I'd probably have gone completely insane listening to all the inevitable noise that's generated from living with this many people. Whenever I see an article like this I always wonder why anyone would want a quieter PC.